It is the job of the poet to bring forth the heart’s most difficult truths, and for me, Millay did exactly that. I had to remind myself, it isn’t the job of the poet to make her reader feel good about themselves.
But Millay proved, time and time again, that social convention would not deter her.īut more than her iconoclastic attitude toward queerness, it was her breezy approach to commitment, in contrast with my delusion of love as an abiding religion, that kept me feeling, more than anything, naïve when I sat with her poems. In the early 1900s, that was a rare and risky thing-to write about, or to be. By then I was in love with a woman and had a newfound empathy for Millay’s work, which often implicated queerness. I didn’t learn who she was until four years later, when a public television program requested that I do a close reading of one of Millay’s most well-known sonnets, “I shall forget you presently, my dear.” That poem is a flippant and carefree take on the fickle nature of a romantic vow. Perhaps he was more like Millay than I was. Unlike Edna, I was, at the time, terribly monogamous and heartbroken over the fact that the particular lover I was mourning then was polyamorous and uncompromising. Vincent Millay is famous for her reflections on love, which were illuminated in her many sonnets about romantic impermanence and the heart’s unreliability. But in what I would learn to be true Edna fashion, I was visiting a lover. I was not attending the residency, nor had I ever heard of the poet after which it was named. Any opportunity to leave the city was one I took. All of my things were in a storage locker on Eastern Parkway, which meant I was living out of a suitcase until I could figure where to go next. I was staying with a friend under the bridge on Broadway, where every seven minutes, her entire apartment would rattle and scream while the JMZ loaded into and out of the station. I graduated college the week before and moved out of my apartment in Brooklyn. Vincent Millay, tucked away in the rural Berkshires of upstate New York. I had been driving for several hours and ended up at the Millay Colony for the Arts, an artist residency located at the former property of poet Edna St. I didn’t know who she was, but I was at her house.
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